12-Month Trends & Predictions: Cyber Criminals Will Keep Getting Richer

Just as it does now, the insatiable drive for profits among hackers and spyware creators will dominate the development of new and more threatening applications and methods, used to steal our identity, bank account information and anything else that can be used.

The days of worrying about pickpockets are long gone. These are dangerous times where gangs of thieves around the globe are connecting online and for the first time working as a team to figure out new ways through the most advanced firewalls, safety nets and cyber guards. Never before has there been such phenomenal cooperation amongst the bad guys of the cyberworld. This cooperation is creating new and increasingly sophisticated threats on a daily basis.

Malware and Trojans Are The Newest Service Industry

From the very beginning of the Internet we have had to protect our systems against individuals who work diligently to profit from illegal means. Originally these individuals worked alone and a sense of competition developed between cyber criminals. Unfortunately this is rapidly changing and we will all be the ones who will pay for it.

The trend amongst these thieves remains the same: using malware, spyware and attacks to make as much money as possible. This trend and those utilizing these nasty methods are becoming so well known and so profitable that an entire secret industry has quietly popped up to support these criminals.

Companies, individuals and independent contractors are now offering enhanced services for malware creation and even custom Trojans with support contracts. These custom services are already impacting end users with custom-created Trojans and malware that are coded to target specific banks of the buyer's choice. Malware suppliers are now also offering 48-hour patches and variants to their buyers and service contract holders, promising almost instant work-arounds to patched holes and security software updates.

It appears that this new and more formidable breed of data thieves and cyber criminals have created a very sophisticated communications network, forming underground messaging systems that carry out waves of attacks and then are quickly destroyed and recreated elsewhere. The criminals do not know one another by name or by face but rather by their secret cyber handles such as MalwareMamma and IDGod. This makes tracking and apprehending these dangerous criminals very difficult.

In many ways these criminals are doing a better job communicating than law enforcement or the online security industry itself; instead of operating in their own tight-knit groups these new digital villains are sharing code and distributing the latest algorithms on an increasingly frequent basis.

My predictions for online crime and cyber security for the coming year are alarming:

Botnets Will Take Over

• Botnets are going to become more prevalent as hackers cooperate readily with one another much like a large network of open-source developers.
  
• The majority of newly created botnets will continue to target flaws in Microsoft Vista and other Microsoft products.
  

Smart Phones Are Next

• Smart phones and other wireless devices such as the upcoming iPhone and current PC-like phones on the market are growing in popularity. This has caught the attention of the hacking community and I am expecting to see a sharp increase in phishing attacks, spyware and other forms of data theft. These attacks designed to steal one's identity will be closely followed by a storm of mobile spam.
  

VoIP Systems

• VoIP systems will also see an increasing volume of threats with Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) helping to create new opportunities for hackers to sell the end-user data they gather to telemarketers.
  
• After this initial onslaught of data theft expect to see new threats delivered via spoofed VoIP accounts just as spammers use fake email accounts to distribute their harmful goods.
  

Windows Vista Security Center

• Industry experts and independent software and security research firms will continue to raise questions over the efficacy of security features added to Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows Vista. Independent review sites and security experts give Defender low marks in spyware detection and removal. According to CNET News.com some critics are unenthusiastic about the Vista security features, because they believe it "offers mostly basic protection and is not the best of its class." Natalie Lambert, a technology and security analyst at Forrester added, “There is no doubt that Vista will be Microsoft's most secure operating system. However, most secure is not equivalent to secure.”